The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    yet none may call it genocide...

    By jollyroger on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 4:01pm |
    From the Annals of Inhumanity:

    Place: Lebanon, the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla.

    Time: 1982.

    Dramatis Personae: A gunman from the Israeli ally militia, a just-orphaned 10 year old boy, a cameraman.

    Action: Immediately after killing the boy's father, the Israeli surrogate takes careful aim and kills the child. Horrified, the cameraman asks "Why did you kill that boy?" Gunman replies, "He just watched me kill his father. When he grows up, he will have but one goal in life-killing me, or someone just like me. I'm not going to let him grow up."

    From the Annals of the Affirmation of Life in the midst of despair:

    "Security prisoners" held under Israel's "administrative ( read due process free) detention", denied the conjugal visits enjoyed by common thieves and murderers, are smuggling sperm to their wives, several of whom are now pregnant.

    This story is brought to you by The United Semitic Peoples' Kemalist Front.

    "One Semite, One Vote. One State, No Yahwists."

    Comments

    Demography is destiny..

    by jollyroger on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 4:17pm

      Detention without trial isn't genocide. Even Sabra and Shatila wasn't an attempt to exterminate an ethnic or national group. But if anyone wants examples of massacres carried out by Israelis, rather than by their allies, google Dawayima, Safsaf, Qibya, Khan Yunis, Rafah, and Kafr Kassem.


    by Aaron Carine (not verified) on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 6:31pm

    I was pivoting from the fairly blatant interference with reproduction targeted at the politically imprisoned. obviously administrative detention isn't " genocide" but it is part of an overall regime which ( as you correctly cite) stretches from forced evacuation, inculcation of terror, etc. (I refuse to use the odious term " ethnic c-------g" for obvious reasons.) I call the overall attitude one of apartheid- "we want the Arabs gone, we dont care how, and the ones we can't drive out we will isolate within our " Jewish state"

    by jollyroger on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 8:52pm

      If what  the Israelis are doing amounts to  genocide, then so does Arab terrorism.There hasn't been an attempt to exterminate the Palestinians. The Arabs aren't being expelled as they were in 1948(and on several occasions after that).


    by Aaron Carine (not verified) on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 9:16pm

    I suppose you would take less exception if the title read "apartheid" instead of "genocide". Not the first time you have objected to my choice of opprobrious frame. think " poetic. license, if you must. ( if you had been Coleridge's next door neighbor you probably would have poured coffee into him to bring him down and we never would have gotten the good stuff.) .

    by jollyroger on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 9:06pm

    So you don't think "genocide" is a politically & historically charged dog-whistle word, and takes away from the fair & balanced framing?

    I'm hardly a big fan of Israel's actions with its neighbors, but no, I don't think "genocide" or "apartheid" appropriate for describing this prisoner treatment.

    How did we describe these things before Afrikaaners & Nazi Germany?


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 9:16pm

    Fair and balanced? Who do you think I am, Chris Wallace?

    by jollyroger on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 11:14pm

    I think they used to call it eugenics, or something like that. simple racism will do.

    by jollyroger on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 11:25pm

      That's a toughie; if Coleridge needed to be an opium addict to write, should we have tried to wean him off it, or kept him on it for the sake of literature? But we don't have that problem here; the abuse of the word "genocide" doesn't make for either good poetry or good punditry. If we consider what Israelis are doing to be genocide, we should use the same word to describe Arab terrorism.


    by Aaron Carine (not verified) on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 9:27pm

       I know I repeated myself; that was for emphasis, although some might call it obsessing.


    by Aaron Carine (not verified) on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 9:38pm

    I will concede that genocide is over-the-top to describe refusing conjugal visits. I'm not sure what to call the ghettoization of Gaza, though. Apartheid, shitstorm though it provoked when used by Carter, seems to me a bit flat.

    by jollyroger on Fri, 03/15/2013 - 11:21pm